3G's suitability for a Internet Hungry South Africa
Though I love Vodacom's offering albeit with all the drops and slowing downs, I somehow cannot imagine this getting better… For some or other reason (most probably to capture market share) Vodacom is positioning 3G as a Wireless Broadband product instead of the Mobile Data application it is designed for… What is the difference? Most prominently the fact that 3G is highly dependant on amount of subscribers in the network and path losses. Primarily it is intended for downloading associated content over 3G enabled mobile phones at high speeds and in short spurts If you look anywhere in the world you will see that the premium on 3G Data is specifically used to encourage subscribers to spare their bandwidth intensive downloads for the evening over ADSL… Due to Telkom's excessive ADSL pricing, mobile operators face the glorious scenario whereby they can offer 3G data on price parity with Telkom's HomeDSL 384. HOWEVER, even if there is price parity, the two are NOT even close when it comes to performance. For example, 10 ADSL users in a given street can each download close to 500kbps and provided that there is enough capacity from the DSLAMs back into the network, all have (close to) guaranteed throughput. Put 10 3G users on one cell sector and see the throughput drop to far below 100kbps. GUARANTEED. Maybe that is not a problem right now, but the mere fact that 3G One is positioned at a sector of the market that WILL exploit as close to 1GB as possible, I see huge capacity problems arising. It would be nice to know what Vodacom allows in terms of contention ratios on their 3G One Service (seeing that WBS and MyWireless are so happy to share theirs) Also, unless of course this is proprietary information, it would be nice to know what the total traffic capacity is that they allocate to an average CBD and residential base station respectively…
Whereas WBS and MyWireless is concerned, the technology is by implication MUCH more tolerant to higher numbers of users and concurrent use, and I still maintain that they could have been successful IF Vodacom and MTN stuck to their guns (as they suggested 3 years ago) that 3G will only be launched in SA around 2006/2007. WBS and MyWireless now finds themselves in a situation more or less like a guy who has never driven a car, entering a Formula 1 race in a Ferrari (apologies to Williams supporters!!!). Even with the best car, the chances of learning how to drive, becoming good at what you do, and eventually getting a podium finish, is not possible. The experience in rolling our base stations, upgrading existing ones ,owning high sites, providing customer service, managing a device procurement strategy, and burning millions of rands in order to gain market share, is something mobile operators are quite well acquainted with.
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